Jokes for folks who sing along to both TOOL and Gordon Lightfoot in the car.

Thursday, November 21, 2013

Cat in a Cold Stone Cistern

(Which is really the opposite of a Hot Tin Roof.)

My parents live in an old farmhouse they bought at a real estate auction in the early eighties for a song. What song, I don't know--maybe it was that old favorite, "You Will Never Stop Remodeling This House (and one day your son's friends will Saran Wrap a dead possum to the porch)."

Anyway, it's a farmstead, which means it came with a garage, outbuildings, and an actual barn with hay and Official Farm StinkTM in the actual barn. At the time, a local farmer still housed his cows there and pastured them in adjacent fields; the fence that ran the eastern length of our front lawn was electrified. An electric fence, oh what fun! I still have an eye twitch from that game.

Because it's a farm, there are lots of cats roaming around. This is just how it is. They're not pampered indoor cats with immunizations, sterilizations, toys, and fully functional limbs. Nope. It's a rough life for a farm cat--at least it used to be. I can't tell you how many abandoned litters I tried to hand-raise when I was a kid, only to have most of them ultimately crawl behind major appliances to die, which is a memorable day in any eleven-year-old's life.

"This kitty smells funny!"

Anyway, there is now a fairly stable herd of cats at my parents' homestead. (I don't know what you call a large group of cats--a flock? Gang? Audience?) And most of them get along just fine. My mother nurses the sick ones as best she can, taking them to the local vet as needed. The latest to need such treatment was an adorable kitten named Molly, who was originally named "Malcolm McDowell," after the actor in A Clockwork Orange. I'll let you digest that for a moment.

After Molly's visit to the vet, she was allowed to recuperate in the basement. Recently, my mother went down to feed Molly, but the kitten was nowhere to be found; beyond some disembodied meowing, she could have vanished into thin air. Turned out Molly had gone exploring and gotten trapped in the old cistern adjacent to the basement. (What's a cistern? A kind of well where old timey folks stored rain water. A good place to bury the bodies in modern times.) My mother cobbled together a kind of stick/fishing line device to try and rescue the kitten, but the entire contraption fell into the cistern.

(Hang on ... I'm having a Baby Jessica flashback ...)

"I was so heartbroken," my mother continued. "I was ready to crawl into the hole to rescue her, but I wouldn't fit. You could hear the kitty just meowing and meowing, and it was so sad. Dad said it would probably take four days to die of thirst down there. I was too depressed to even listen to Garden Talk on Saturday morning."

Well, there's no way my mother was going to endure four days of progressively sadder / softer meowing and another week without Garden Talk, so my parents called A Guy (we all know A Guy, right?) who helped secure their barn's foundation and is good at "lifting rocks and things." The plan was to strategically remove a few of the rocks cemented into the wall between the old cistern and the basement so my mother could crawl in and retrieve the lost kitty, but it turned out that would put the entire house's foundation at risk.

Plan B: cut a hole in the ceramic tile floor in the kitchen, which covers the cistern. So The Guy strategically cut into the tile floor, and there was the kitty! My mother lowered an old sheet into the hole, hoping the kitten would claw its way up, but instead it just rubbed its head on the end of the sheet. So, The Guy made a tiny ladder from some wood scraps, and the kitten eventually clambered up.

"The bad news is, there's a hole in the kitchen floor," my mother added. "The good news is, Dad's going to make the hole bigger--"

(I interrupted here with an outburst of laughter.)

"--and turn the old cistern into a root cellar, with a trap door in the floor to get in."

Jesus, this is getting long. I don't really have a good way to end this story, other than to say: a) the cat made it--yaay!; and b) let's hope a small child doesn't fall down the hole before the trap door is installed.